Adeyinka Makinde, Writer

Wednesday, 7 March 2018

“We did not
reject our past. We said honestly: ‘The history of the Lubyanka in the
twentieth century is our history…’ - Nikolai Patrushev, director of the FSB,
Excerpt from an interview in Komsomolskaia
Pravda, December 20, 2000.

The secret
services of Russia have garnered an enduring reputation for ruthlessness.

Whether dealing
with internal opponents (Think: Ivan The Terrible’s Oprichnina, the Tsarist Okhrana,
Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka and the
NKVD terror orchestrated by the likes of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and
Lavrenti Beria) or the external apparatus (Think: Viktor Abakumov’s SMERSH, the
role of the KGB in smashing anti-Soviet movements in Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, as well as the exploits of the GRU, Soviet military
intelligence), the apparatus’ of espionage and counter-espionage have set
unenviable standards in uncompromising brutality.

The
extraordinarily repressive capacities of the gulag system was of course
immortalised by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago and the Lubyanka has become synonymous with Bolshevik
terror replete with a signature style of execution every bit as emblematic as
revolutionary France’s guillotine: a bullet to the back of the head.

Yezhov’s name
provided the label for the most brutal part of Stalinist terror in the 1930s,
the Yezhovshchina. That term was the
invention of a scared, scarred and cowed populace. But the protagonists of
terror have not shirked from either publicly extolling the merits of the
wielding of terror or in revealing the ruthless objectives of particular
institutions created to promote the security of the state.

Thus it was
Dzerzhinsky who declared during the early Bolshevik era that “we stand for
organised terror”. And it was Stalin who coined the phrase Smert Shpionam, “Death to Spies”, from which the name SMERSH, a
conglomerate of counter-espionage organisations within the Red Army, was
derived.

And death has
often been the lot of Russian and Soviet traitors: Major Pyotr Popov in 1960,
Colonel Oleg Penkovsky in 1963 and Major-General Dmitri Polyakov in 1988 were
officers of the GRU who were executed as agents acting in the service of foreign
powers.

In Penkhovsky’s
case, the legend persists that he was bound to a stretcher and incinerated
while alive in a crematorium as a warning to potential traitors. All the
evidence points to him having been shot, but the tale of his presumed fate is
indicative of the perception of many in the West of a Russian predisposition to
cruelty and even barbarity in dispensing ‘justice’ to those perceived as
enemies of the state.

“Fear has large
eyes” warns an old Russian proverb, and to many in the West, this is as true
today as it was in Joseph Stalin’s time. Apart from presiding over numerous
purges and the entrenchment of a repressive, totalitarian order, Stalin, who
was Georgian, is claimed to have been influenced by Caucasian notions of honour
and vengeance in the pursuit of his former rival Leon Trotsky. Not only was
Trotsky assassinated by an agent of the NKVD in 1940, his family was destroyed by
assassinations and persecutions inflicted by the Soviet state.

Some now seek
to paint contemporary Russia with a similar brush. Under Vladimir Putin, who is
often posited as a practitioner of the Russian brand of oriental despotism,
they point to the deaths of dissenting journalists, political opponents and
dissident former members of Russia’s security services. A case was made against
two former FSB officials, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun for responsibility
in the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former colleague of the FSB who died
from polonium poisoning in 2007.

Now, the same
allegation is being made in regard to the suspected poisoning of Sergei
Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence. Skripal had been
convicted of revealing the identities of Russia’s secret agents to MI6,
Britain’s foreign intelligence service. In 2010, he was released into British
hands as part of a ‘spy swap’ in Vienna.

At the time,
Putin was quoted as declaring that “traitors always end badly. Secret services
live by their own laws and these laws are very well known to anyone who works
for a secret service.”

But those who
consider this a self-incriminating statement need to bear the following in
mind. Skripal, who was officially pardoned by Russia’s then-President Dmitry
Medvedev, did not suffer the fate of those who committed similar acts during
the Soviet era. In fact, many would argue that he got off lightly with a
thirteen-year sentence.

It begs the
question: why would Russia attempt to kill Skripal at this time?

While many
Western observers will pooh-pooh Andrei Lugovoi’s assertion that Skripal’s
targeting is “another provocation by British intelligence agencies” aimed at
demonising Russia, others will be more circumspect and reserve judgement
because such a campaign of demonisation has been orchestrated in the West and
promoted by the mainstream media for over a decade.

Further, the
notion that Britain’s intelligence services cannot themselves be involved in
the dark arts of murder and ‘black operations’ is simply not tenable. From the
so-called ‘Lockhart Plot’ against Vladimir Lenin engineered by M1-1C the
precursor to MI6 to complicity in the murder of Congolese leader Patrice
Lumumba and a plan to assassinate Irish Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, Britain’s
intelligence services have been involved in homicidal conspiracies. Yet, the
official narrative continues to uphold the pretence of an almost benign
intelligence apparatus averse to plots involving assassinations.

While the
aforementioned remarks of Nikolai Patrushev have been taken as evidence by
Western analysts that the Russian intelligence service continues to embrace a
draconian ethos, it is also worth recalling his comments about British
intelligence which he insisted in 2008 has since the times of Queen Elizabeth
I, “operated on the principle that the end justifies the means.”

Monday, 29 January 2018

In North New
Jersey, most of the Mafiosi owed allegiance to the Genovese, the family which
traced a direct line to Luciano himself, and before Luciano to Guiseppe ‘Joe
the Boss’ Masseria, one of the so-called antiquated heads known as the
‘Moustache Petes’ whom Luciano contrived to eliminate and pave the way for the
modern Mafia with its ruling national commission.

It was
written after his shooting that long before he made it to the Garden, Frankie
had developed “cherished friendships in the high society of the Jersey City
streets” particularly, it was alleged, among the “soldiers and followers” of
Joseph Zicarelli. The local ‘wise guys’ could always make good use of the
neighbouhood toughs and none came tougher than Frankie. Most of the gangsters
who featured in Frankie’s life were Genovese. The Moscato, from the Mount
Carmel area of the city, were suspected of doing a lot of dirty jobs for the
‘big boys’, and frequently came around the pool hall looking for Frankie. Even
Frankie appeared to be cautious of them. Another figure with whom Frankie
dallied was John DiGilio. DiGillio, an ex-middleweight boxer, was in charge of
the Hudson County Genovese crew which in turn was under the overall command of
Bobby Manna. He would remain an important figure within the Genovese power
structure until his decomposing body was discovered in 1988 in a mortician’s
bag floating in the Hackensack River. Two bullets were lodged behind an ear.
DiGilio, who was based in Bayonne, specialized in many things including loan
sharking; an activity for which he was facing a sentence at the time of his
demise. One Jersey City nativewho
borrowed $111 from DiGilio ended up paying him back $3,000. A person who missed
a payment would have to pay a penalty which rose by about $25 a day. After
that, “You owed them your fucking life.”

Sunday, 31 December 2017

An enriching
Christmas holiday in the Bohemian city of Prague which is abundant in culture,
architecture and history.

The “City of
a Thousand Spires” is immersed in the legend of Wenceslas (or Vaclav the Good),
the martyred Duke of Bohemia and exhibits a distinct Christmas culture that
reflects its Central European heritage.

It has a
charisma of its own.

There is the
mystique of the Charles Bridge and the powerful life force of the River
Vlatava, which was of course immortalised by the composer Bedrich Smetana. In
the Old Town is the Astronomical clock and a monument dedicated to Jan Hus, the
religious leader whose refusal at the Council of Constance to renounce his
ideas concerning reformation of the Catholic Church led to his being burnt at
the stake as a heretic on July 6th, 1415. That form of Czech courage and
stubborness is reflected in the memorials dedicated to the British-trained
participants in Operation Anthropoid, the successful mission of assassinating
Reinhard Heydrich, the Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia in 1942.

The miniature
street known as Golden Lane encompasses the magic of Prague while the Hradcany
complex - home of the Bohemian kings, presidents, Communist Party dictators,
and, for a brief historical interlude, Nazi Reich Protectors of Bohemia and
Moravia- exemplifies the grandeur of Prague and its towering achievements in
architecture.

Jewish
culture and heritage is found in the Jesofov (or Jewish Quarter) where the Old
Jewish Cemetery is, and the treasures and the tragedies of European Jewry are
encapsulated respectively in the Spanish and Pinkas Synagogues.

The
distinctiveness of a Czech Christmas was underscored by the tradition of
celebrating Christmas Eve as Christmas Day. The Christmas Markets were quaintly
attractive and the native Czech dishes exotic and filling.

Friday, 29 December 2017

A memorial plaque featuring the images of a paratrooper and a priest on
an outside wall of St. Cyril and Methodius Church in Prague [PHOTO: Adeyinka
Makinde]

In a society that lives by moral rules, assassination cannot be morally
justified. But when a nation is enslaved by murderers and fanatics,
assassination may be the only means of destroying evil. - Frantisek Moravec,
wartime head of Czechoslovakian military intelligence.

The 1942
assassination of Nazi figure Reinhard Heydrich in Prague while he was acting
Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia is often described as one of the most
daring missions of the Second World War. Conceived in Britain and executed in
Prague by Czechoslovakian commandos, Operation Anthropoid was the work of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE), the so-called ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly
Warfare’, that had been charged by Prime Minister Winston Churchill with the
responsibility for setting Nazi-occupied Europe “ablaze”.

Espionage and
sabotage was to be its raison d’etre.

But killing a
high-level official such as Heydrich was not an
easy decision to make. Indeed, both Allied and Axis forces refrained from
specifically targeting chiefs of state for assassination. The killing of
Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto by the United States is the only other
comparable act, although a successful completion of Operation Flipper by
British commandos which had the unstated aim of killing Field Marshal Erwin
Rommel would have rivaled that and the Heydrich action.

The key
factor which would have exercised the minds of the decision-makers, among them
the president of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile, Edvard Benes, was the
inevitable reprisals that would follow.

The Nazis had
shown no compunction in employing brutal methods of retaliation aimed at
civilian populations in response to partisan acts of sabotage and insurrection,
and this would be true in the aftermath of Heydrich’s death. The destruction of
the village of Lidice amply testified to this. The fate of Roman civilians in
the Ardeatine caves after an ambush of an SS police regiment on Via Rasella in
1944 would later provide a reminder of this form of bloodlust.

Reprisals of
this nature, although contrary to existing rules of international law, were
part of the culture of fascism. The Italian Blackshirts insisted on the
standard three-day orgy of bloody revenge against defenceless civilians in
Addis Ababa following the assassination attempt by insurgents on the
Mussolini’s viceroy, Rudolfo Graziani.

But the
British were insistent that the mission be carried out and the exiled
Czechoslovak leadership, conscious of the largely successful pacification of
the Czechlands by Heydrich’s ‘carrot and stick’ methods, and keen to be seen to
be pro-actively contributing to the resistance effort, were firmly for striking
at the reichsprotektor.

Both Jan
Kubis and Josef Gabcik, the former an ethnic Czech and the latter of Slovakian
origin were selected because of their impressive credentials as soldiers. Both
had been decorated for bravery during the Battle for France. They were warned
that they were unlikely to survive the mission, but accepted without
hesitation.

As is the
case with special forces commandos, they were chosen because of their
intelligence and ability to think on their feet: Their primary order was to
kill Heydrich, but it was left to them to formulate a plan of action. After
several months of planning, they devised it. They noted the lightly protected
Heydrich’s unvaried route into Prague involved traveling through Kobylisy in
the city’s northern suburbs where a sharp bend forced Heydrich’s chauffeur to
slow down. At this point, Gabcik was to rush onto the street and aim for
Heydrich with a Sten sub-machine gun. A nearby tram stop would provide suitable
cover while they waited for the signal of a third soldier, Josef Valcik.

When
Heydrich’s Mercedes Benz convertible finally approached the bend, Gabcik
positioned himself in front of the car but found his gun jammed. After ordering
his driver to stop, Heydrich raised himself to full height in the car and aimed
his pistol at Gabcik. But Kubis threw a bomb at the car, a modified anti-tank
grenade, which exploded and incapacitated Heydrich.

Both men fled
the scene in different directions.

They did so
under the impression that they had failed. However, Heydrich, who had been
rushed to the nearby Bukova Hospital, succumbed eight days later to the
septicaemia caused by shrapnel, seat-spring splinters and fragments of the
horse-hair used to cushion the car’s upholstery.

Gabcik,
Kubis, Valcik and four other paratroopers eventually found refuge in the crypt
of the St. Cyril and Methodius church on Resslova Street in the New Town part
of Prague. But the hideaway was discovered by the Gestapo from a trail of leads
provided a Karel Kurda, a fellow paratrooper who lost his nerve and opted to
collect the 10 million Krona-reward offered by the German authorities.

The church
was surrounded by hundreds of SS troops and when it was eventually stormed,
three of the paratroopers, including Kubis, who were on night watch on the
choir loft, engaged the Germans in a two-hour gun battle that left them dead.

The German
attempts to enter the crypt were futile as were Kurda’s efforts to make them
give up. They made good on their retort that they would never surrender by
ending their lives with their last bullets and poison.

Although the
story was retold in a number of books and films such as Atentat (1964) and Operation
Daybreak (1975) provided rousing reconstructions of the events including
the use of the site of the assassination and the church, it is only in recent
years that memorials have been officially sanctioned. The crypt of the church
now functions as a museum, the National Memorial to the Heroes of the
Heydrich Terror, while the site of the ambush now has a plaque and a
statue.

Sunday, 10 December 2017

Last night’s clash between Ukrainian world super-featherweight champion
Vasyl Lomachenko and Guillermo Rigondeaux, the Cuban-born super-bantamweight
champion was a long awaited date of this year’s boxing calendar. Although it
was not contracted as a “catchweight” contest so as to narrow the disparities
in both men’s weights, it was eagerly anticipated by aficionados of the fight
game because they are two of the greatest amateur boxers in recent history.
Each man won two consecutive Olympic gold medals and each had well over 300
amateur contests with Lomachenko losing only once and Rigondeaux on twelve
occasions. So while ever mindful of the boxing maxim that a “Good big ‘un
always beats a good little ‘un”, many felt that the level of skill possessed by
the smaller man would diminish the significance of weight and make it an even
contest of sorts. However, what transpired was a stunningly one-sided contest
which ended with Rigondeaux quitting on his stool.

I thought
that many ‘neutral’ people would be for Guillermo Rigondeaux in the lead up to
his clash with Vasyl Lomachenko. What not to root for in a man who was punished
for attempting to defect from Castro’s Cuba only to make good his escape in a
subsequent effort and begin a professional career in the United States?

But in
America, he fell foul of his despotic promoter Bob Arum, and even though he
became a multiple champion, he was avoided by scared opponents who used the
innovative excuse that he was “too boring”. Getting on in age and acutely aware
of the need for a payday, Rigondeaux chased Lomachenko for a marketable fight
between two of the most talented figures in the history of amateur boxing who
as professionals are feared champions.

However,
instead of a catchweight contest, Lomachenko -guided by a shrewd and
unforgiving Arum- insisted that Rigondeaux jump two weight divisions and
recieve the lower end of the available purse monies: Rigondeaux is reputed to
have earned $400,000 to Lomachenko’s $1.5 million. To compound things, the WBA
announced that Rigondeaux would lose his title if he lost to Lomachenko even
though the fight was not scheduled for that weight.

This is why I
would have expected most to have been rooting for “Rigo”. While the odds
continued to be stacked against him, many felt that by fighting at his
efficient weight and utilising his slick skills, Rigondeaux might have had
enough to neutralise Lomchenko’s split-second changes in ‘angles’ with his own brand
of athletic agility and that his explosive one-hit power could be as effective
against a bigger opponent.

Yet, while
the disadvantages of weight, age, as well as Rigondeaux’s comparative lack of
bouts over the past few years must be factored in to explain his poor
showing, many onlookers are convinced
that Lomachenko’s unique brand of boxing skills which utilises a complex
geometry of foot movement and a high punch rate was the decisive factor in
Rigondeaux’s physical and psychological unravelling. He succeeded in forcing
Rigondeaux to quit much in the manner that Sugar Ray Leonard outboxed Roberto
Duran into saying the notorious words: “No Mas”. It is unlikely that any x-ray
slides or photographs purporting to corroborate Rigondeaux’s alleged hand
injury would displace this opinion.

Teddy
Brenner, a legendary matchmaker at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, once
said of the great Nigerian boxer Dick Tiger as he fought in his twilight years
having moved up to the light heavyweight division: “He always gives away
height, weight and reach, but he never gives away heart”.

I thought
that was going to be a fitting accolade to Rigondeaux’s challenge to
Lomachenko, but apart from the fact that Rigondeaux had a reach advantage over
his taller, heavier opponent, it appears that Lomachenko took away his heart.

Saturday, 25 November 2017

Yukio Mishima speaking to an audience of Japanese soldiers at Ichigaya Barracks Tokyo on November 25, 1970.

It is hard to imagine a more surreal scenario than one where a globally
famous writer stages an abortive coup d’etat at a military barracks before
committing suicide. Perhaps Wole Soyinka’s infiltrating of a
Nigerian television station where at gunpoint he ordered a newscaster to stop
the announcing of the results of a fraudulently contested election in the
mid-1960s comes a distant second (Soyinka was later arrested and charged, but
acquitted on a technicality). But by ceremonially disembowelling himself prior
to being decapitated, Yukio Mishima had to many modern-thinking and Westernised
Japanese seemingly turned the clock back to the Middle Ages.

His actions on November the 25th, 1970 remain incomprehensible to his
countrymen.

Where some saw elements of “psychotic craziness” others could discern a
carefully choreographed piece of theatre, a last act in the life of a man who
was an eccentric but also a brilliant artist. He was a force of literary
creativity and public controversy.

He lived in a state of perpetual contradiction.

A man imbued with a love of Japan’s rich heritage and proud of his
Samurai ancestry, he was also intensely drawn to the Western world to which he
often travelled and from where he relished the acclaim heaped on him. He even
lived in an Italianate villa in Tokyo. He was married with two children but was
apparently homosexual. And while he often projected the ambiance of a
deep-thinking intellectual, he had a fascination with swords and was obsessed
with bodybuilding and physical culture. As a boy he had been thin and weak, but
later while living amid the trappings of upper middle class gentility, he found
an outlet for a yearning to be something of a ruffian gangster, a role he
played in cameo roles in films.

Mishima’s love of many things Western did not extend to wholeheartedly
embracing Western notions of liberal democracy. He was decidedly right-wing and
subscribed to to the ideology of Emperor worship, albeit that he alienated many
Japanese monarchists when he denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his
claim to divinity. He memorialised what he considered to be the martyrs of the Niniroku
Jiken or ‘February 26 Incident’, an abortive coup in 1936 that had been
orchestrated by Imperial Japanese soldiers belonging to the Kodo-ha
faction which aimed to purge what they perceived to be the corruption in the
Japanese political and business classes in order to return Japan to a
pre-industrialised and pre-westernised state that would be run along
totalitarian lines by the Emperor with the assistance of a bakufu or
military government.

Mishima merged his political thinking with his enduring thoughts of
death in a short movie in which he starred in 1966 titled Yukoku
(‘Patriotism’). In it, he played an army officer linked to the failed plot of
February 1936 who commits seppuku.

It was something of a rehearsal of his macabre ending.

In his later years, Mishima would form a private militia he called the Tatenokai
or Shield Society. It is from this group of young followers that he recruited
the men who would accompany him to the Ichigaya barracks where under the
pretense of paying a courtesy call to the commandant, would take him hostage
and threaten to kill him unless he was allowed to give a speech to the soldiers
in the main courtyard of the establishment.

The soldiers cursed him and mocked him as he enjoined them to rebel and
free Japan from what he argued were the shackles of American military and
cultural domination. They were, he chided, “American mercenaries” in a Japan
that had “no spiritual foundation”.

It was a fruitless plea and one which most believe Mishima knew was
doomed to fail. He had had a death wish, it is widely believed, since his youth
when he had feigned sickness in order to avoid being drafted into the Tokubetsu
Kogekitai, the air corps of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which in the latter
part of the Pacific War employed a strategy of suicidal combat. The guilt of
not enlisting as a Kamikaze and perishing honourably in flames haunted
him all his life. Some argue that he realised that he had reached his creative
peak as a writer and could see no future on earth. He had, after all, been in
the running to become Japan’s first Nobel Laureate in literature before he had
stepped aside to make way for his mentor Yasunari Kawabata. Others point to
writing where he explicitly declared that having built a powerful-looking body,
he would not yield voluntarily to the degenerative force of the natural ageing
process.

“The body”, he had written in Sun and Steel (1968), “is doomed to
decay, just like the complicated motor of a car. I for one do not, will not,
accept such a doom. This means that I do not accept the course of Nature. I
know that I am going against Nature. I know that I am forcing my body onto the
most destructive path of all.”

In death, it is believed that he formed a lover’s pact, taking his male
lover, Masakatsu Morita with him into the afterlife.

His call from the balcony at Ichigaya barracks while dressed in his
military tunic, for Japan to reclaim its martial past while ostensibly
attempting to rouse the Japanese military to armed rebellion was in the final
analysis a ruse. It served as cover for the fulfillment of a life-long
obsession with seppuku. That he believed it would offer vindication of
his life and the values he propagated is clear in the words of an interview he
once gave during which he differentiated between the Western and Japanese concepts
of suicide:

Jersey Boy

Dick Tiger

About Me

Adeyinka Makinde trained for the law as a barrister. He lectures in criminal law and public law at a university in London, and has an academic research interest in intelligence & security matters. He is a contributor to a number of websites for which he has written essays and commentaries on international relations, politics and military history. He has served as a programme consultant and provided expert commentary for BBC World Service Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia. He is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal (2005) and Jersey Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula (2010).